


that constant pull, that ceaseless tide

by Itgoeson



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Force-sensitive!Finn, M/M, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, possible Poe/Finn/Rey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-09
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-05-12 17:58:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5675275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Itgoeson/pseuds/Itgoeson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finn waits, in the aftermath.</p><p>(The pretentious force-sensitive Finn fic you deserve, and a love story in more ways than one.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	that constant pull, that ceaseless tide

When Finn wakes up, he is alone.

Rey is gone. He can feel it somewhere just below his collarbone, an absence that does not hurt so much as make itself known. He does not bother to ask the medical droids about her. 

Poe is not there, theoretically. But Finn can almost feel him, knows the faint smell of grease and the angle of the chair can only be from him. He does not bother to ask the nurse who makes the rounds just as he slips off to sleep again.

Poe will come back.

Rey will always come back.

Finn can wait.

\\\

Poe and Rey are still gone, when he wakes for good, but Finn swears the doctors used the Force to heal him. He sits up with only minor pain, can move and walk mostly on his own.

He has a cane for the first week. Poe comes back from an intelligence mission three days before he’s cleared to stop using it. 

(Finn wonders at the look on Poe’s face when he sees the cane – the shock, the relief, the sheer joy. Finn knows the feeling.)

\\\

Finn needs something to do. 

He doesn’t miss the First Order, and he likes reading, likes eating, likes walking the base and learning everyone’s names and ranks and stories. 

He thinks that might be a thing to do – learn people the way he’d learned a blaster. He just needs something to do.

Between that, though, he trains with everyone on base. It’s easy enough – there are never enough hands, enough bodies. Finn convinces Jessika to help him learn X-Wing and freighter maintenance, runs simulations in the quiet hours to get the hang of flying. He runs errands for General Organa and learns how to cook twenty pounds of stew in an hour from Zembwai in the kitchens. 

Finn refuses to clean anything more than his room. 

\\\

The ache in his chest grows from one day to the next. It’s still painless, still dull like filtered sunlight, but it grows warmer. 

He takes to watching the skies when he can’t sleep. Finn likes the quiet nearly as much as he likes the bustle and static of the main corridors of the base, the feeling of people and life where out here there is only his destiny, heavy like gravity.

Poe squeezes his shoulder, smiles. It looks faintly queasy, but Finn is still learning the finer points of facial expressions. He supposes Poe might be trying for sympathy. 

“Rey’ll be back soon,” Poe tells him. He sounds hopeful.

Finn beams. “She’s on her way. It’s been days, though,” he adds, tearing his eyes away from Poe. “Must’ve been some ride to Skywalker.”

Poe blinks at him, a half smile on his face. It’s not his happiest look, Finn thinks, and halfheartedly wishes people could be a bit more obvious about what they’re feeling.

“You’ll love her,” Finn tells him, because it’s true and it’s a thing to say. Then, “She’ll love you,” because Poe and Rey are tied up in his mind in a way that feels similar to the sunburst in his chest, because he needs it to be true.

Poe reaches up to brush a hand through Finn’s hair. It’s comforting, which seems to be the intent. He leans in to press their shoulders together. 

Gravity and destiny will bring Rey back to him.

\\\

Poe leaves again, this time escorting a freighter on a supply run. Routine, he’d called it.

Finn understands this is meant to comfort him. 

Finn understands that gravity is not a concept Poe is not entirely familiar with, but he wishes him luck all the same.

\\\

Finn takes up mending. It feels sensible, trading tips with a being three systems past the farthest he’s ever been, learning how to live on his own.

His destiny is tied to people, not a place. He likes to know he can stand on his own no matter where he ends up, no matter how hard a planet pulls at him.

\\\

There is an itch in his skin. It feels like Poe, like cosmic storms, runs up his forearms like lightning. 

It jumps and frizzes worse and worse. Finn takes to checking in at Command, watching as Poe’s coordinates get further out. 

The feeling spreads, until it collides with the sharp heat in his chest.

\\\

Rey touches down the next day. She is glorious, and the small sun in his chest is more comfortable than comforting for the first time in months.

Luke Skywalker is terrifying. Then again, he grew up being told Skywalker is what Poe calls the Trooper’s version of the Boogie Man.

\\\

Rey is dazzling. She’s competent, clever, looks lethal even at rest. For all that, she’s still kind, still confident. She pulls him into a hug and he sees spots the way you would after looking into the sun for too long. 

There is a sea around them, people waiting breathlessly for their newly returned heroes. 

They are waiting to see if they’ve bet on the right ship, if they’re going to sacrifice themselves for a winning cause. Finn knows these people, even when their faces move too fast for him to keep up. Knows they are terrified and loyal in equal measure.

Finn sees the pull on Rey, sees a new kind of gravity.

(He hates himself for believing it, but thinks it suits her all the same.) 

\\\

Poe returns while Rey is meditating. 

Finn feels like this might be for the best. His arms have yet to stop fizzing, even if they calmed during Poe’s flight back. He hugs Poe for longer than he cares to time, long enough and hard enough that he loses the goosebumps on his arms, small hairs finally laying flat. 

It is, he thinks, an entirely unnecessary symptom of missing Poe.

And Poe, it seems, is ecstatic. He ropes Finn into a half hug as they move along the corridors, arm slung over Finns shoulders, sides slipping and hips bumping. 

\\\

Rey does love Poe. 

At least, she asks him questions on flying for half an hour straight before Poe offers to show her his X-Wing. She flits her hands over most of it, mouthing parts and prices to herself. 

BB-8 shows up and points out things she might have missed. 

Poe knocks shoulders with Finn as BB-8 starts picking at different wires and chirping excitedly. 

“I knew I left those First Order Assholes for a reason.”

Poe sputters, Rey laughs, and BB-8 gives him a fiery thumbs up. 

\\\

Finn wrangles his way into medical training. First aid isn’t something he ever learned. Isn’t something he’d known he could learn. 

Rey takes to dragging him out for lunch, and BB-8 corrals the lot of them to dinner most nights. 

(He brings training manuals to every meal. Poe can usually get away with stealing them.)

(Rey never tries. She knows intimately the decay of waiting. Better to pull the world in than to let it string you out through the years, sand off pieces of you with the days and years it takes to become.)

\\\

“Can I kiss you?”

He asks Rey when he knows they have nowhere to be for a few hours, no one to be. 

“I don’t think I’m interested in you like that.” She shrugs. “I don’t know if I have the time, to be what you need. For you to be what I need.”

Finn smiles. “No, I know. But. I was thinking about asking Poe. I wanted something to compare it against. To know if it was. If it feels right or.” Finn smiles again. Rey is easy, is sunlight, and does her best not to burn him. He gives her honesty in return. “But, if you ever wanted that – if you ever needed me like that. I’d be happy to try, too.”

It seems to unwind something in Rey. Her gravity slips, for a half second, and she is free. 

Rey closes the gap between them and kisses him. 

It is clumsy and they try a couple times because it is interesting and new. In the end, they leave off it to grin against one another’s lips. 

It’s not the right time, for them. 

Finn promises he’ll be there, though, if it ever is.

\\\

Rey leaves again. The sun in his chest becomes a dull ache once more.

Fin wonders if anyone else can feel it. 

\\\

He stays in medical training. Stays and stays and stays.

Poe likes to joke that Finn fell in love with the place while he was in a coma.

Poe kills and Rey kills and Finn used to clean the blood off the exercise mats and killed Stormtroopers when he had to. Now, Poe can fly and Rey can fight and Finn can fix them. Can help fix anyone who needs it. 

Finn likes to learn people, learn their anatomy and how to take the pinch out of their foreheads. 

Poe likes to leave, to fly and fight and leave.

Finn learns that the lightning on his skin isn’t observable. No one looks at his arms twice when Poe’s gone, or jerks back from shocks. He is alone in knowing how far away Poe is, how he’s doing, just as much as he’s alone in the warm ache in his chest that Rey dug out.

Finn learns that knowing is a kind of loneliness, too. 

\\\

His arms crackle, feel like a thundercloud, and Finn rushes to the Command room. 

“Poe. Black Squadron. Are they alright?”

There is a shiver over the comms even as he speaks. The General looks at him carefully before tilting her head towards one of her Admirals. 

The comm cracks again, radio static. Jessika calls in her ID, tells them they’ve been ambushed. Two pilots down but a victory all the same. Finn balls his hands into fists to keep from interrupting, asking about Poe. 

His arms feel charged, though, like there’s a lightbulb dancing on his skin. Finn tells himself it’s a good thing and apologizes to General Organa. 

She smiles, like she understands. 

She makes her own gravity, though. Has rewritten her destiny. Finn doesn’t quite know what to make of it.

\\\

Poe’s X-Wing limps and shudders into atmosphere, thumps on the ground. BB-8 is beeping and whirring and Finn is running to get Poe out of the cockpit, carefully steadying him over the edge and onto the ground. 

He’d been venting oxygen. Carbon monoxide poisoning, Senior Medic Trambu tells Finn, placing a seven-fingered hand on Finn’s wrist. 

Trambu is honest above all else, hardworking and compassionate but pragmatic at heart. Finn nods, squeezing the hand on his wrist before sitting down at Poe’s bedside. 

“Just until he wakes up,” Trambu reminds him. 

Maybe Trambu can sense the pull between the two, the gravity that weights them together like bodies sinking in a lake, Finn thinks.

\\\

Finn reminds Poe that he has the worst ideas when he wakes up.

Poe reminds Finn that he wasn’t a Trooper, thank you very much.

(Finn leans in to tell him that is was destiny, not a choice, because Poe knows as well as he does that Troopers are taken as children, if not infancy, and because Finn can choose some things, and his words are one of them.)

(Poe shoves his face away, smiling softly, telling him to get back to work.)

\\\

Finn kisses Poe a week after the Incident. 

They are watching the stars again, huddled together as the nights begin to frost and nip. They are watching each other, carefully. 

Finn can wait, but he knows what waiting does to a person.

What waiting is doing to him.

\\\

Rey finally comes back, six months later. She’s lost a great deal of her tan, her fingernails are worn, there’s a bandage over her side Finn’s itching to look at, and she’s home. There’s a meteor shower in his chest.

She walks up to him and immediately cuffs him on the back of his head. 

Behind him, Poe laughs through his nose. Finn makes a note to tell him how unattractive it is later.

“Are you telling me you’re Force sensitive and you only use it to keep track of Poe?” She hisses at him.

Finn starts, yelps, “Force sensitive?” 

“Yes, you kriffing toddler. General Organa told Master Skywalker last time she suspected it. Last transmission she got, she said he might have another student.”

Finn shakes his head. “It’s not like that. I just – I feel things, about you two. You and Poe. And they’re pretty accurate.”

Poe lets out a strangled sound, like he was trying to keep quiet and instead died a very small death. Finn snaps around to look at him. 

Poe shrugs, blushing. “Sorry. This – this just isn’t my life. It can’t be. I already know General Organa. Better things can’t happen. I.” He stops, blinks at them. “Maybe I need a nap.”

He stays, though, and Rey laughs at them both as Finn rubs a hand up and down his back. 

\\\

Luke tells him he’s “barely Force sensitive” and Finn lets out a sigh of relief. He can hardly handle being barely a Stormtrooper, the hours that slip by as he fights off conditioning and panic attacks and works to figure out people’s faces. He doesn’t need to have to open up the universe on top of it. 

He just needs to know his friends are safe.

\\\

Finn and Rey are sitting on his bed, playing with an old holo, stripping it and putting it back together, arguing about where pieces should go, arguments Finn knows full well Rey will win.

“When you leave next time,” Finn tells her when they hit a lull in their bickering, “take me with you.” He pauses. “Poe, too, if you can swing it.”

She smiles. “Is this the Force telling you to ask, Mr Barely Sensitive?”

Finn chuckles. “Maybe. But you have to admit. Whatever destiny’s headed our way – it’s better to face it together. Three of us – it’s a stronger pull. Maybe we’ll make our own gravity.”

And he supposes it doesn’t make much sense out loud, but Rey nods like she understands (like maybe she feels it too). 

“I’ll see what we can do.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is saved as "space trash" on my computer. Just so you know.
> 
> I also couldn't get the idea of Finn as, like, selectively Force-sensitive out of my head. Like, he's so easily devoted, he just decides Rey and Poe belong in his life and decides to do everything he can to keep it that way and whatever Force-sensitivity he has is channeled into that, maybe?


End file.
